"Where did my money go" budgeting has never worked for me. I've been way more successful with planning ahead every $ of income as I get it and then manually tracking expenses. Budgeting had to become an actual activity for me, and not just something done automatically by a webapp. I'm a huge shill for YNAB[0]. The software is really nice but basically it's a glorified (paid) spreadsheet. My fiance and I agree that the methodology it forces you to use, though, has easily saved us thousands so far.
What's worked best for me is putting all of my income into one account and then just giving myself a fairly low monthly 'allowance' into my personal checking account (at a different bank), from which I spend out of (including rent, student loans, etc.). It took a few iterations to get the monthly value correct so I wasn't running much of a deficit or a surplus.
But now it's good and I don't sweat the small stuff, and I can skip eating out in order to buy a new bike part or whatever. I do look quarterly-ish and see what I am actually spending on.
I do something similar, albeit a bit leakier. I have all my money coming in to one nexus account, and then I have weekly/biweekly/monthly outflows of everything (bills, stock investments, transfers to 3x different banks, mortgage). I keep that account with a bunch of buffer, but ignore all my other accounts. Each month I keep that main account 'floating' is another month where all those other accounts are growing. If I ever dip too low, I can supplement with one of my other accounts.
It's not a great solution, but it's the one that I've stuck with best.
I couldn't agree more - I tried mint for a while and I basically did nothing with it besides checking my transactions.
YNAB completely changed how I view my money. Now when I go to buy something, I don't just go spend. I see how much I have in that category, and if it's not enough, I either move money to it from another category, or not buy it.
It's been very helpful for me in my goal of saving more than 50% of my take home pay.
Wow, this news was crushing. I was on the fence about getting ynab for a couple of months now and I was going to get it sometime this week. Coincidentally the trial of ynab made me detest subscription models more than I already did and then they became a subscription model! This is really saddening.. Are there any good replacements that you are aware of (since I do know that ynab is essentially a glorified spreadsheet, but I do like their methodology).
What I hate more is the thought of having my financial data stored in some shady, cobbled together, cloud service, hosted somewhere on Amazon AWS.
I predict, that it is only a question of time until they will encounter some disastrous data leak.
Begin a YNAB user for more than a year now, I am really angry at them for this move. So I'll guess I have to move on to something else after the support for the YNAB4 apps will be shut down.
I completely agree. We've got support until December so I'm considering replicating as much of YNAB 4's methodology and functions as possible in either Excel or Google Sheets when I have free time.
Yea I've been on the fence about trying that out, especially since it's missing some key features (reporting, the calculator). At least YNAB4 is supported til the end of 2016, gives them time to get the new one fixed up.
This is my plan as well. I'll continue to use classic thru it's end-of-life support cycle and then revisit nYNAB and see if they've managed to at least hit feature parity.
I'm a big fan of YNAB as well (classic, web just isn't there yet and normally I'm the first to jump on the web bandwagon). I'm still just getting started with it but it's an awesome tool!
The unfortunate thing about apps like these is that if you are wise enough to use it, you are wise enough to not need it.
Totally anecdotal, but the people I know who have trouble managing money are just completely unaware of it. Money goes in and money goes out, and they only do something if someone calls them or sends them a letter. As soon as you show these people the numbers, they get it. It clicks for them.
Mint and Penny both suffer from the same thing those "hire a maid" apps suffer from; Once I've made the initial contact, I have no reason to continue to use the service, I can just contact the maid directly. Same thing with Mint/Penny; Once I am shown my finances, I have an awareness of my financial situation and don't need the service any more.
What will drive me to continually use this service, beyond my initial few weeks? You can only analyze my finances so much before there is nothing left to tell me. And then you will get to the point that Mint is at, where you start offering me credit cards and credit reports and mortgages, because that's the only thing left to do in this space.
You're totally right that people who have trouble managing money in general don't use these kind of apps. Before starting work on Penny, we asked a hundred or so people "how do you manage your money?" The prevailing answer was, "I don't." So when you give them the tools to do that, it really helps them understand their situation.
What we see as the real problem is comprehension and usability. Many people we talked to shy away from apps like Mint because they're complex and intimidating. From a more technical/analytical/affluent standpoint (where I come from), I don't have an issue using Mint and querying my own data, but it's important to remember that I'm different from most people. So, we think that giving people that awareness of their financial situation in a friendly, relatable, and understandable manner goes a long, long way.
Regarding continued use: everybody's finances are a representation of their life, and as life changes, your finances do too. So we think there's a lot Penny can do to help you on an ongoing basis, like tell you about how your new commute to your new work is affecting your gas spending and your savings rates; mention how Comcast just bumped your bill up by 10%; point out that your Starbucks spending has been trending up and might start being a significant money drain, etc. We might be wrong, but we think we and everybody else in this space have only scratched the surface of what insights can help people with their finances.
I see a lot of services going this way; interacting with an AI, rather than a user interface. Facebook is doing this with their messenger, Microsoft with Cortana, etc. etc. I suppose you guys are the next iteration of this for financial management. Maybe I'm just being "old-man-get-off-my-lawn" by preferring a UI over a textual conversation with an AI...
I totally disagree about Mint. I have accounts across so many different services (bank, credit cards, loans, investments) and it saves me so much time because I only have to log in one place and I can see the full picture of my finances. I also like the trends feature so I can breakdown spending into different categories. Plenty of financial services have stats on their sites, but mint unifies all of them.
Ah, fair enough! That is not an issue for me, all of my accounts, cards, and investments are with one bank. Perhaps I have downplayed the importance of these services because of that.
"and you hereby appoint Penny as your true and lawful attorney-in-fact and agent, with full power of substitution and resubstitution, for you and in your name, place and stead, in any and all capacities, to access third party internet sites, servers or documents, retrieve information, and use your accounts, passwords, and other information"
I think this might (should?) be standard phrasing for any app that accesses another company's API on your behalf...
We may not think of it this way, but this seems like correct legalese for any sort of assistant app, whether it takes your username and password, or you give it an API key.
One thing to clarify: it's just me and one other guy (imalex) working on this, although we're hoping to hire another person soon. We're not trying to screw anyone over with the privacy policy. We just don't know anything about legalese, so we relied on existing terminology.
Congratulations on shipping! I wouldn't worry about complaints like this too much, it kind of happens a bunch on hn.
Have you studied what mint and personal capital are doing right/wrong? Just wanted to say a word of caution as I've heard of different banks making life hard for mint.
AFAIK they won't experience the same issues as Mint until they achieve a similar userbase size. The complaints from the banks was the server load that Mint was putting on them for information they felt users potentially weren't using.
I hope my comment didn't make for sour feelings. I'm positive your team is working in good faith (more legalease!) and I'm cheering on for Penny's success.
While that may be standard language in a ToS, I can't waive that broadly written right.
And does it come with any indemnity for error, or does it make it completely legal for the company to wire your money to the Bahamas and run off with it?
I have no idea, but it's definitely your perogative to make sure it doesn't (even though many of us will not).
Also even if that stuff wasn't explicitly written into the agreement, as long as it wasn't excluded, that's kind of what you pay good lawyers for. I highly doubt a reasonable judge is going to rule on the side of the fraudsters without such a clause -- pretty sure it falls under the purview of "good faith".
Yeah, that's a great service, but I think something automated would solve the scaling problem. It feels like a much easier problem to solve than general-purpose natural language processing because - my impression is that - so much legalese is stock phrases and boilerplate. Even something that would tell me what "true and lawful attorney-in-fact" would be a start! IANAL, obviously.
Looks useful and neat, but remember kids: if you're not paying for it, you're the product.
Some of their competition: http://linxo.com (used it for 5 years now), http://bankin.com (used once, preferred linxo).
Fair point. Right now we're not making any money off of users. Down the line, we'd like to explore freemium features or perhaps a subscription model. We don't want to or plan to sell your data.
And for completeness: in the US the competition includes Level Money and BillGuard.
This looks great, really good UX/UI from a first glance. My bank has a pretty modern banking app, so some of the features (like spending graphs) are familiar to me (though not as pretty as in Penny).
Two things that I dislike with my banking app:
- No real differentiation between fixed, monthly cost and variable expenses. It would be nice if the automatically separated monthly expenses and one-time expenses.
- Lots of "-$100 Cash" transactions whenever I use an ATM. This is my main concern actually. It's really hard to have some sort of insight about my finances without seeing the biggest part of my non-expenditure spending: The stuff I pay for in cash. Especially since it distorts the monthly overviews: If I retrieve $500 from my bank account on July 31st, it's not helpful to add that to my July spending, since 90% of that money will probably be spent in August. This is really a data-entry/UX problem, no API will solve this. One thing that I would suggest: Make an extension that makes it really simple to "scan" receipts. Just one glance of the camera, some OCR and the data is in there. If it's simple enough, it may become part of my "muscle memory" to scan receipts with the app whenever I buy something, so I get meaningful analysis results.
(By the way, if you want to build something like that, check out this API: https://scanbot.io/de/sdk.html - great product & company, I'm not affiliated in any way)
I try to, but there is all kinds of scenarios where I revert back to cash: I have to have cash in my wallet anyway for things like parking tickets, so sometimes when I'm in a rush I use it. Or for example when I purchase something via card, and split the cost later on with somebody. He pays me back in cash, and it's back in my wallet.
Does it know what category to put something in if I use cash?
From my experience tracking what I spend, it's those transactions that I actually need to keep track of if I'm going to spend money more sensibly. All of the headline, automated bills that get paid monthly are easy to manage. It's the little transactions of a few bucks here and there that add up to that "Where the hell did this month's wages go?!" feeling.
If there isn't a good way to track cash transactions then it's not likely to change the way I handle my money, and consequently it wouldn't be very useful for me.
I'm not really into the simulated live chat interface. It'd be a lot easier to click a button that said "Your spending" than to type out "Please show me my monthly spending Mr. Robot" (or to type out anything, especially on a phone).
There's actually not a lot of typing involved since the responses are pre-populated for you. You can see an example of what that looks like on the marketing page.
This relies on you actually remembering the text commands though, as opposed to just seeing the different buttons and taping whichever one you care about.
Are you serious!? Every Paragraph in their Privacy section reads like:
"We totally won't collect your data; and definetly won't store them, BUT we kind of do something similar and you just have to accept that"
Nobody should ever use this BS!
I don't want to throw Mint under the bus: I used it for ~6 years before starting to work on Penny and it's a great tool for people that enjoy spreadsheets and crunching numbers (myself included). That said, it can be pretty intimidating to just to about everyone else. Penny requires a lot less effort on your part, since the number crunching is all done behind the scenes to generate cool insights.
To answer the specific question of why _you_ might switch: Mint hasn't really improved beyond the addition of more ads in the past four to five years. It's painfully slow (at least for me) and still has not learned that my gym membership is not software.
My main concern in using sites like this is that they'll leak my banking credentials. Mint uses Intuit's service for communicating with financial institutions, which is also used for Quickbooks and TurboTax. Credentials are encrypted and housed in a datacenter owned by Intuit. The Mint application only ever stores a token representing the account and uses the service to pull transactions from a read-only service. While I'm still uneasy about this setup, the isolation of the systems combined with the scale and the resources devoted to keeping it secure provide some piece of mind.
Can you talk about the measures that you use to protect banking credentials so that I might feel similarly safe about giving them to your service?
There are actually three major players in the transaction aggregation space: Intuit, Yodlee, and Plaid. We use Plaid, but it works the same as Intuit. In fact, Plaid has a partnership with Intuit to backfill support for bank accounts.
We never store any credentials on our system, and our access is read only. I can go on for days about why I think our system is more secure than, say, Chase[0], but if you trust Mint's practices it's probably sufficient to say that we use an almost identical system.
That's... moderately comforting. I recently started using Mint and it's proving very helpful for tracking my spending and budgets. It's really worrying having to hand over my bank account username and password, though.
I really wish banks could provide a read-only API token instead.
Because Mint has been horribly broken and useless from the day Intuit bought it. Currently I use an excel spreadsheet in lieu of my now-inactive Mint account. Because even nothing is better than mint.
Odd, I hear this complaint all the time but have never personally experienced it. Mint has always worked for me, even with a bunch of esoteric 401k and other accounts from no-name banks.
I had the same issues with Mint, it was always broken, always giving back unreadable account errors, always missing stuff in searches, never applying tags properly (and no mass tag update, argh).
Check out PocketSmith. It may not have every feature I want, but at least it actually works. There is a nominal monthly fee associated with it, but well worth it if you want to actually use an online money analysis tool to do anything.
I tried using the Wallet app from Budget Bakers for a while and failed miserably.
The app seemed fine but I could never consistently remember to enter all my puchases into it right away. After a few days or even a week or more of forgetting I would struggle to remember exactly what I spent and where, especially from generic ATM withdrawals listed on my bank statement.
The app became useless for me because of that.
I really want a budgeting solution that works for me but haven't found one yet, beyond just making an Excel spreadsheet of monthly incomings/outgoings and then using that to work out what my remaining 'fun' money is.
We wish. A couple things that are stopping us: the transaction aggregator that we use (Plaid) doesn't support international banks, and the UK/EU in particular have stringent regulations on connecting to a bank account from a third party service.
I wish all banks would have a read only feed of my data that I could give to apps like this. (Though as I am in the EU there are actually very few that do the integration (if any))
[0]http://youneedabudget.com - they recently upgraded to a subscription based web app but I'm still using the classic version that's a one time purchase: http://classic.youneedabudget.com